injuring twenty-six others. A local man, Michael Hulse, described the scene as ‘like a battlefield. I was watching television when it went off. The windows shook and rattled. It was like a 25-pounder cannon going off. I went outside and there were about a dozen bodies lying on the road.’3
The Assistant Chief Constable of Surrey, Christopher Rowe, had been put in charge of the Guildford bombings inquiry, but neither he nor those around him had a clue as to who had carried out the attacks, although they suspected it was the work of the IRA. As Gerry Conlon put it, ‘They were killing people in huge numbers. The IRA caused absolute terror. And they [the British police] couldn’t find them.’4 Nevertheless, ‘they’ soon found him.
On 28 November 1974, 21-year-old Paul ‘Benny’ Hill was arrested by police in Southampton, and the next day he signed statements confessing to the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. During police interrogations, Hill named Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Armstrong’s 17-year-old English girlfriend, Carole Richardson, as his fellow bombers. Hill also told police that he and Gerry Conlon had stayed with Gerry’s aunt, Annie Maguire, while they were in London. This, and a false confession from Gerry Conlon that was exacted by police under duress, were enough to have Mrs Maguire and six other members of her family arrested. Mrs Maguire’s protestations of innocence accounted for nothing when police alleged they had found traces of the explosive, nitroglycerine, on her hands and on the person of the six other members of her extended family. Included in what became known as the ‘Maguire Seven’ was Giuseppe Conlon, Gerry’s father, who hadn’t even been in England when the bombings occurred, and who had travelled over to England from Belfast only on 1 December to help co-ordinate his son’s legal defence. Prophetically, on the evening of 5 December, Giuseppe Conlon was in his police cell when Detective Chief Superintendent Wally Simmons of the Surrey bomb squad shouted in to him: ‘You want to know about your son? Well, he’s going to get thirty years. We’ll see to it that you die in gaol. I’ll see you later.’5
By 7 December, the Guildford Four had all confessed to the bombings and were subsequently charged with multiple murders. Gerry Conlon described his time in police custody:
In my cell I could suddenly see myself and what I was doing, maybe for the first time. I wanted to please the police just so I wouldn’t be beaten any more, screamed at, abused with dirty names. I actually wanted to please these bastards. I was in a terrible state of confusion and fear. I was crying. I was breaking down and falling apart. And all I wanted to do was to please these policemen – to please them and get away from them.6
For the police, it was seemingly a job well done. For the real bombers, it was business as usual, and for the next year their campaign of violence continued unabated as they shot people dead and bombed targets all over London, almost at will. In the period up to the IRA ceasefire, which commenced on 9 February 1975, police records show twenty-nine incidents that were directly attributable to that particular IRA cell.
When the cell continued its campaign in August 1975, after a collapse of the IRA ceasefire, its members were no less industrious, and between November and December they carried out six bomb and bullet attacks, including the doorstep assassination of Ross McWhirter, the co-founder, along with his brother Norris, of The Guinness Book of Records. Ross had put up a reward of £50,000 for the convictions of those involved in the IRA onslaught and that, in the IRA’s view, made him a target. It was not until the Balcombe Street siege in December 1975 – almost a year after the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven had been charged – that most of the IRA cell were finally arrested.
During questioning, Eddie Butler and Joe O’Connell told police that they had bombed Woolwich. Moreover, they said they did not know any of the Guildford Four. Despite this confession, the police failed to inform the Guildford Four’s defence counsel about the IRA men’s admissions, but they did tell the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Curiously, the DPP’s office never acted on the senior policemen’s report; they buried it. Accordingly, no further action or inquiries were initiated, no one went back to Butler or O’Connell to challenge their accounts, and neither man, nor any member of that IRA cell, was charged with the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. No one in the DPP thought it prudent, or desirable, to question whether or not the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven might be innocent. Besides the IRA, it took a formidable effort by the police and the judiciary to put and keep the Guildford Four in prison.
On 16 September 1975, Mr Justice John Francis Donaldson, Master of the Rolls, opened the trial of the Guildford Four. Donaldson had been president of the National Industrial Relations Court and had antagonised trade unionists so much that they tried to impeach him ‘for political bias’.7 Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader, accused him of having a ‘trigger-happy judicial finger’.8 His trigger-happy judicial finger pointed the jury in only one direction. In the matter of Paddy Armstrong’s evidence, where Armstrong had said he had made a confession only because he was high on drugs, Justice Donaldson told the jury: ‘He was high on drugs when he was arrested and when the effects of them wore off thereafter, he said, he was induced to sign them because he was very frightened of the Surrey police.’ Justice Donaldson thereafter told the jury that, ‘I would not have made a false confession, but Armstrong may be different from me.’ One could be forgiven for asking the obvious questions: how would his honour know if he would have made a statement or not? Had he ever been high on drugs?
Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson pleaded not guilty, but Paul Hill, when asked to plead, said: ‘I refuse to take part in this. I refuse to defend myself. Your justice stinks.’ Hill may have been correct in his assessment, but to a London jury in 1975, a plea of non-recognition of the court – which was essentially what Hill had first entered – was akin to admitting to membership of the IRA, and wasn’t it the IRA that had carried out these atrocities? After conferring with his client, Hill’s counsel, Arthur Mildon QC, entered a plea of not guilty on Hill’s behalf.
Sir Michael Havers, the Conservative Shadow Attorney General, led the prosecution team. The only evidence against the four was their jumbled confessions, but that was enough. During his summing up of the evidence against Paul Hill, which was applicable to all the defendants, Justice Donaldson said: ‘Finally, as with all these confessions, you may wonder how it is possible to produce quite so detailed a confession if it is not true. You will wonder whether there is any other reason, because certainly none has been suggested, for making such a suggestion, other than it being true. There it is.’
There it was indeed.
Oblivious of the fate of Gerry Conlon and his three co-defendants, the IRA cell launched ‘phase two’ of its bombing campaign on 27 August 1975, when cell members Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty placed a ten-pound bomb under a seat in The Caterham Arms, in Caterham, Surrey. Twenty-three civilians and ten soldiers were injured in the no-warning blast, with eight victims being critically injured. More attacks followed. It was as if nothing had changed. Nothing had for the real bombers.
Shortly after two o’clock on 22 October, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts against the four accused. Bemoaning the fact that he could not put the black cap on his learned head, Justice Donaldson, in his sentencing, expressed regret that the four individuals had not been charged with treason, which carried a mandatory death sentence. Nevertheless, he took some comfort in sentencing the four to life imprisonment. Justice Donaldson recommended that Paul Hill never be released from prison, and Gerry Conlon should serve a minimum of thirty years.
But Justice Donaldson was not finished with this matter. On 27 January 1976, he presided at the Maguire Seven trial. His final words to the jury on that occasion could not have been clearer: ‘But if, members of the jury, having considered all these matters, you are sure, then it is your duty, your duty in accordance with the oath that you have taken, to bring in a verdict of guilty.’ When the guilty verdicts were returned, Justice Donaldson gave Annie Maguire, who was surely the IRA’s most unlikely bomb-maker, the maximum sentence of fourteen years’ imprisonment. Her husband Paddy received the same
